Paula Modersohn-Becker

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) was a German painter who became one of the most important precursors of Expressionism, creating a radically simplified figurative style that broke decisively with nineteenth-century naturalism. Born in Dresden into an educated middle-class family, she trained at the Berlin School of Art for Women and then settled in the artists' colony at Worpswede in northern Germany in 1897. At Worpswede she met and married the landscape painter Otto Modersohn and absorbed the colony's commitment to the North German moorland landscape and peasant subjects. But her repeated visits to Paris—in 1900, 1903, 1905, and 1906–07—exposed her to Cézanne, Gauguin, and the Post-Impressionist tradition, and her response was to develop a style of extraordinary boldness: simplified, archaic forms, flattened colour planes, a gravely direct approach to the human figure that had no precedent in German painting. Her subjects—peasant women, nursing mothers, children, self-portraits—are rendered with a monumental simplicity that gives them an archaic, almost pre-classical quality. The paintings in this batch—Girl in a Birch Forest, Girl with Rabbit, Girl with child, Alte Bäuerin, Birches, Girl between the Birch Trees, and multiple flower-wreath girl studies—show her characteristic combination of Worpswede woodland subjects with a radically simplified figurative language. She died in 1907, just thirty-one years old, three weeks after the birth of her daughter.

Modersohn-Becker's mature style is among the most radical in early twentieth-century German painting: her figures have simplified, rounded forms with broad flat colour planes and direct, unpsychological gazes that dispense entirely with the academic tradition of naturalistic rendering. Her paint surface is dense and tactile, with warm ochres, earth reds, and pale greens. The birchwood settings of many of her Worpswede paintings—Girl in a Birch Forest, Girl between the Birch Trees—place simplified figures in rhythmically patterned vertical forest compositions.

Modersohn-Becker is one of the most important precursors of German Expressionism and a major figure in the history of women's art. Her radical simplification of the figure—achieved independently from Picasso and ahead of his proto-Cubist breakthrough—makes her one of the most original artists of the early twentieth century. Her early death prevented a development that might have placed her among the very greatest modernist painters. Her self-portraits, including the first nude self-portrait by any woman artist, are landmarks in feminist art history.